surgery
oracknows | February 26, 2008
...and this time it's a home invasion.
Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sig pointed me to this incident, which has all the markings of still more animal rights terrorism. This time, the attack occurred at the University of California Santa Cruz and involved a home invasion by masked intruders:
SANTA CRUZ - A UC Santa Cruz faculty member whose biomedical research using animals sheds light on the causes of breast cancer and neurological diseases was the target of an attack Sunday afternoon, reportedly by animal rights activists.
UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal confirmed late Monday that an off-…
oracknows | February 25, 2008Back in late December, I came across an op-ed piece in the New York Times written by Dr. Atul Gawande, general and endocrine surgeon and author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, that struck me as a travesty of what our system for protecting human subjects should be, as it did fellow ScienceBlogger Revere.
In brief, the article described an action by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Human Research Protection that, on its surface, appeared to be a case of bureaucracy hewing to the letter of the…
oracknows | February 21, 2008I have to hand it to Abel Pharmboy. No one else I know would live-blog his own vasectomy.
Even though my traffic is greater than his, he's definitely trumped me as a blogger today.
oracknows | February 21, 2008Earlier this month, I was remiss in not noting an update to a story about which I had written before, a story of domestic terrorism carried out by so-called "animal rights" advocates who are utterly opposed to the use of animals in research. The series of attacks began with an intimidation campaign against a UCLA researcher named Dario Ringach that succeeded in frightening him to the point where he gave up doing primate research. Against Ringach himself, the campaign consisted primarily of harassment by phone and other means. However, Ringach was spooked by a botched attack on another UCLA…
oracknows | February 11, 2008As I mentioned, I was on the road over the weekend. Unfortunately, that means I didn't manage to come up with a new post for this morning. That's OK, though. Off to the archives we go. This post originally appeared on February 7, 2006. Holy crap! That's over two years ago!
Enjoy (I hope). Fear not, new stuff will appear this afternoon or tomorrow. I just didn't manage to have time to finish today's intended post and bring it up to the high standards I demand. If I have time I'll tune it and post it this afternoon.
Nonmedical people always seem to have a conception of surgery as being a…
oracknows | January 27, 2008This story is a couple of weeks old, but I've only just come across it. It reminds me that there may be some things worse than death, and this is one of them:
To see the face of 32-year-old Huang Chuancai is to witness a rare genetic condition in its most terrible form.
Chinese doctors say Huang, of China's southern Hunan province, suffers from a disease known as neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of neural cell tissues.
For many of its sufferers, the disease means abnormal growth of these tissues and, as a result,…
oracknows | January 21, 2008In the mood for some great surgery blogging?
Then head on over to the latest edition of SurgeXperiences over at Counting Sheep. While you're at it, head on over to the SurgeXperiences archive site and peruse past editions.
oracknows | January 15, 2008
Today is a very sad day around my lab.
I've just been informed that one of my scientific heroes, the man whose work inspired me to enter the research area that I entered, namely tumor angiogenesis, died last night. Yes, sadly, Dr. Judah Folkman reportedly died of a heart attack last night.
I had the honor of meeting Dr. Folkman on two or three separate occasions, one of which was for a laboratory meeting that involved discussion of our lab's work. A self-effacing and humble man, he was a true scientist, always questioning, always thinking of new hypotheses to test based on answers that…
oracknows | January 14, 2008I'd be remiss if I didn't note that Mark Hoofnagle of denialism.com has exited the rarified (and much less stressful world) of the laboratory and has dived headlong right into the clinic again, starting out with his surgery rotation.
As an old geezer (OK, middle-aged; it just feels old when each year's crop of new interns looks younger and younger), I'm amazed that he has any time at all to blog. Certainly, back in the day when giants walked the earth, such blogging would have been unlikely at best. It must be the 80 hour work week. In any case, he's made some observations about surgery, many…
oracknows | January 10, 2008In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in improving surgical outcomes. One strain of research tends to examine the "volume-outcome" relationship, which in essence asked the question if the volume of cases that a surgeon or hospital does has a relationship outcome. In other words, are mortality rates lower, survival rates better, or the correction of symptoms more reliable for a given surgical procedure in the hands of surgeons who do more of them per year or hospitals in which more of them per year are done? On the surface, it would seem self-evident that the answer must be yes,…
oracknows | January 9, 2008(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.)
Cancer is scary. It's very, very scary, even when it is a cancer that is treatable and potentially curable. It's such a common disease that, by the time we reach a certain age, the vast majority of us have seen at least one friend or loved one die of some form of cancer. All too often, that death is horrific, and even when it is not the wasting and weakness that is often seen before the end provokes a visceral reaction matched by few diseases. Moreover, the treatments of cancer can be toxic.…
oracknows | January 5, 2008"It's a miracle!"
How many times have you heard that one, usually invoked when someone survives serious injuries that would kill most people? Personally, the use of the word grates on me and did even when I was a lot more religious than I am now. Yesterday, it grated on me when I saw this story:
NEW YORK -- Alcides Moreno should be dead.
But Moreno, a 37-year-old window washer from Linden, not only survived a 47-story fall from a Manhattan skyscraper, but will likely walk again and make a near 100 percent recovery, doctors said yesterday.
"If we can talk about medical miracles, this…
oracknows | December 20, 2007Evidence-based medicine is not perfect.
There, I've said it. Like anything else humans do in science or any other endeavor, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has its strengths and its weaknesses. On the whole, I consider it to be potentially vastly superior to the way that medicine was practiced in the past, bringing a systematic, scientific rigor to how we practice to replace parts of medicine that tended to be based as much (or more) on tradition or dogma as on evidence. Naturally, a common source of attacks on EBM is advocates of "alternative medicine," who often appeal to "different ways of…
oracknows | December 9, 2007Andrew Wakefield is an incompetent "scientist." Of that, there is no longer any doubt whatsoever, given how poorly he and his collaborators did the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies that he did looking for measles RNA sequences in colon biopsy specimens taken from autistic children, studies in which they failed to do even the most basic, rudimentary controls for detecting false positives due to contamination with plasmid DNA sequences. The harm that came from his now falsified findings of that study, in which he claimed that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism and…
oracknows | December 4, 2007Fortunately, I've never had this happen when I've placed a central venous catheter:
See that bright line with the "J" at the end of it? That's the guidewire over which a central venous catheter is threaded. It's a very bad thing when you push it in so far that you lose it. Worse, is not reporting or admitting that you lost it before transferring a patient to another hospital. (You'd have to be really, really stupid not to realize that you lost it.)
oracknows | December 4, 2007Remember how I speculated that appointing die-hard antivaccinationists to the new federal panel on autism research and policy would be a propaganda boon to the antivaccination movement and the mercury militia? Surprise, surprise! It's already happening. Even less of a surprise, first off the mark to gloat is everybody's favorite whore for the mercury militia appearing (as usual) in his favorite house organ of antivaccination propaganda, The Huffington Post. First, of course, he has to "frame" things to represent himself as the brave, brave iconoclast, fighting against those evil scientists…
oracknows | December 1, 2007The Buckeye Surgeon educates us with a case.
In brief, it's the case of an elderly woman with a clinical picture, including right upper quadrant pain and an elevated white blood cell count consistent with rip-roaring cholecystitis who was admitted to the medical service for her right upper quadrant pain. She underwent an ultrasound, which was consistent with rip-roaring cholecystitis, after which she was admitted to the medical service, which duly consulted the gastroenterology service. Then a CT scan was ordered, which showed a rip-roaring case of cholecystitis. Then the patient was bowel-…
oracknows | November 28, 2007You've probably heard the oft-repeated charge of "alternative" medicine advocates. If you get into a debate or conversation with one, you can almost count on seeing or hearing it before too long. Indeed, we heard a variant of this very claim yesterday coming from über-woomeister supreme Deepak Chopra. I'm referring, of course, to the rant against "conventional" medicine that medication errors claim 100,000 lives a year. Of course, as Mark pointed out, "conventional" therapies actually work, and because they work there's risk to them. Moreover, its hospitals actually care for seriously ill…
oracknows | November 15, 2007Yesterday's mega-post left me a bit drained; consequently I've throttled my ambitions back a notch today in order to leave some energy to put together the weekly installation of Your Friday Dose of Woo tomorrow. Fortunately, just the topic presented itself: A story that's interesting and instructive (hopefully) but that won't take as much of my time to deal with.
But first, a brief recap. A couple of months ago, I discussed a highly dubious fundraising e-mail that was going around, apparently pushed by an organization known as Natural Solutions Foundation, about what seemed on first blush to…
oracknows | November 14, 2007...Then go and visit Aggravated DocSurg, who's hosting the latest edition of SurgXperiences, the only blog carnival for surgery blogging, although his title makes me wonder a bit.